Your book sounds so interesting, I'm really looking forward to reading it, for that matter your article in Esquire is one of the very best I've read on James Dean.
This is such a fantastic article. It's especially helpful in laying out the timeline and the hows/whys. I read (skimmed) Tysl's thesis before but this article made me interested in looking into it again, especially since it was the first major scholarship on Dean and the creation and deconstruction of his media image.
For your book, are you mostly focusing on James Dean and the post-death Dean cult in the 1950s with the Lavender Scare and McCarthyism and paranormal/occult trends of the time? Will it also focus on the revitalization of interests in Dean in the 1970s/1980s and later?
And speaking of the paranormal while it never reached the level of the Elvis ghostly sightings the paranormal James Dean is in books and on youtube (and I'm sure you've seen these videos and obviously know way more than I do on the topic). There are more than a few videos of mediums claiming to communicate with James Dean from across the beyond. In Roy Schatt's photo-memoir he mentioned a movie magazine hiring a medium to hypnotize Schatt to try to bring Dean back from the other side. I know that isn't something unique to James Dean of course-there are videos featuring channeling/messages with other deceased cultural icons as well, but it's interesting to see how almost 70 years after his death and the first generation of fans believed they could communicate with his spirit in Fairmount or feel his ghost on the road to Salinas --James Dean is still a subject of supra/supernatural interests.
Your book sounds so interesting, I'm really looking forward to reading it, for that matter your article in Esquire is one of the very best I've read on James Dean.
This is such a fantastic article. It's especially helpful in laying out the timeline and the hows/whys. I read (skimmed) Tysl's thesis before but this article made me interested in looking into it again, especially since it was the first major scholarship on Dean and the creation and deconstruction of his media image.
For your book, are you mostly focusing on James Dean and the post-death Dean cult in the 1950s with the Lavender Scare and McCarthyism and paranormal/occult trends of the time? Will it also focus on the revitalization of interests in Dean in the 1970s/1980s and later?
And speaking of the paranormal while it never reached the level of the Elvis ghostly sightings the paranormal James Dean is in books and on youtube (and I'm sure you've seen these videos and obviously know way more than I do on the topic). There are more than a few videos of mediums claiming to communicate with James Dean from across the beyond. In Roy Schatt's photo-memoir he mentioned a movie magazine hiring a medium to hypnotize Schatt to try to bring Dean back from the other side. I know that isn't something unique to James Dean of course-there are videos featuring channeling/messages with other deceased cultural icons as well, but it's interesting to see how almost 70 years after his death and the first generation of fans believed they could communicate with his spirit in Fairmount or feel his ghost on the road to Salinas --James Dean is still a subject of supra/supernatural interests.
A 700 page paper? How many pages might your book manuscript be? More to the point, does this late revelation affect your draft?